Maurice was the one exception in terms of striking acumen that I was thinking about as I typed that. But his skills were already on the decline when he first fought in the UFC, and he stubbornly refused to learn even the most basic understanding of submission defence in his early MMA career. And my point below about no striker ever attaining a world title in three years of training stands.

If a striker can keep the fight on his feet, he wins. The problem is that you can pepper a guy all night, defend the TD consistently, then get taken down once and get battered or subbed. Wrestling and BJJ is ridiculously effective at winning fights, but I contend that striking at the highest levels requires more skill and training than grappling at the highest levels. Maia and GSP are the guys that come the closest to proving this wrong, and as we recentl;y saw, Maia’s predictable and mechanical stand-up got him KO’d before he coulkd take the fight into his world. All fights start on the feet. If the striker has the ability to keep it there, he can win . There are extreme exceptions in every discipline however, such as GSP, whose TDs are unstoppable.

Brock, Hendo, Coleman, etc are proof that wrestlers can win fights with striking techniques commonly seen in playground fights at primary schools. But even a world class strikers can’t survive in MMA without some serious training in wrestling and BJJ. Why did Royce dominate the early UFC and submit huge guys from every skill set imaginable??? Because the only way to defend BJJ is with BJJ and nobody was cross-training back then. Same thing with wrestling. The only way to defend a TD is with wrestling sprawls, the only way to scramble back to your feet is with wresling. You can’t defend a double-leg with a jab or spinning back kick. Just as THORAZINE said, the only reason Strikers are able to compete is because they cross-train in grappling defense, whereas grapplers can get by with elementary-school striking techniques like duck-n-cover and hammer fisting a guy on the floor.

elementary school floundering about is useless in the cage. How often does an untrained (in wrestling) striker take a guy down in MMA? Never. But how often have we seen sloppy, pedantic punches KO or TKO a superior striker? Plenty of times. You guys are constantly talking trash about the sloppy looping or awkward punches of Hendo, Rampage, Chuck, Jardine, and Fedor, but these guys frequently use primary-school techniques to KO far more technical strikers. Not to mention the effectiveness of striking on the ground and how many elite strikers have been TKOd by face-pounding moves that my 5 year old nephew frequently employs on his older brother.

i used to live in vegas and i saw a couple of live events for ufc and wec. when carlos condit fought brock larson for the ww belt at the hard rock hotel i was there. henderson had signed with ufc about 7 weeks earlier. he was at the event. there is alot of downtime between fights and everybody mingles. the hard rock hotel in vegas in the old joint where they held their event only hold’s 1500 people. they have since added to the hard rock hotel with two new towers an a new joint where they have the concerts and some wec events. when the prelims started there might have been only 500 people there at the smaller old joint. i saw henderson up close and could not believe he was just the size of an average man. he is an incredible mma fighter but his is not big by any mean’s by middleweight standards